In the Galleries

Giant turtle and digital world dinosaurs unite

Native-American creation myth inspires

variable 'Clouds, et al' at Secrist

July 04, 2008|By Alan G. Artner

There are ideas aplenty in Hollis Brown Thornton's exhibition of paintings, drawings and photographs at the Linda Warren Gallery. Both its title and that of all the pieces on view is "The Earth on the Back of the Giant Turtle," which refers to a Native-American creation myth that the 31-year-old artist has used as a springboard to personal expression.

He explains everything in a statement of intent that makes most other artist statements look paltry. All his forms, compositional devices, procedures and processes are treated there, so woe unto anyone not "getting" what he is up to. Thornton has done precisely what the times have demanded of him. He has given formally conservative works an elaborate program, and the achievement is less in the works themselves than in the explanation tying them all together.

Without the statement, one might be baffled by how his abstract "drip" paintings relate to paintings with transferred photographic images or altered family photographs or rudimentary abstract drawings. But, never fear, even some of his materials have a symbolic significance that his words explain, meaning all will be well as long as text can guide the eye by, in a sense, filling in for optical excitation.

This is, nowadays, accepted practice. But Thornton's different media and styles seem to raise it above the norm. As does his engagement with early digital imagery that prompts nostalgia. It is as if the primitive images of Space Invaders are themselves prehistoric creatures. So the Giant Turtle -- with its plated back suggesting triangles that, in turn, evoke ancient pyramids -- is complemented by, figuratively speaking, dinosaurs of the digital world. And this appears to give satisfying consistency.

If my tone is less than enthusiastic, it's because much here looks like something else we have seen before that received different explanations or, in happier times, didn't need them. (To view the artist's work, see lindawarrengallery.com.)

At 1052 W. Fulton Market. 312-432-9500.

A popular image of summer for previous generations was that of a figure lying on its back staring up into the sky at clouds lazily drifting past. "Clouds, et al," the group show at Carrie Secrist Gallery, appears to set out to capture that idyll, though because the artists all are contemporary there is a darker cast. In other words, Alfred Stieglitz's musical, aspirational "Equivalents" cloud pictures have been, as it were, brought down to earth in images of mushroom clouds that Dietrich Wegner has three-dimensionalized into a child's back-yard playhouse.

The 25 pieces, then, veer between the dreamy and apocalyptic, with the latter frankly giving the show its strength. Drawings, photographs and paintings by Matthew Brown, Megan Greene, Sharon Harper, Robert Longo and Wegner balance the purely airy and atmospheric, giving the show a weight appropriate to a time that also has John Adams' opera, "Dr. Atomic," looking back to the dawn of the nuclear era.

Highlights of the more pacific pieces are Antonia Contro's lightbox, "One Cloud," and "Vista," a short film she and an animator made from the static cloud image. The film, shown in a makeshift tent, has the cloud serenely shifting shapes and recalls the games of interpretation of the skies played by children and their parents in summer. Much else on display here attempts this sort of simplicity, but the Contro succeeds through a deceptive elaborateness that nearly convinces us it has restored something of our innocence.

At 835 W. Washington St. 312-491-0917.

"Three Hours Between Planes: Contemporary Photography from Leipzig and Chicago," at the Chicago Cultural Center, brings together work by 11 young artists trained at the Academy of the Visual Arts and School of the Art Institute of Chicago not only in still photography but also video. A gallery handout says their work "repositions the discourse of photography toward the narrative," though it is seldom the straightforward storytelling of a photo essay or even the now-familiar theatrical re-enactment.

Lilly McElroy's video, "The Square (After Roberto Lopardo)" is seemingly the record of a performance in which two people exaggeratedly prevent others from violating a chalk rectangle drawn on a street in downtown Chicago. Jan Sledz's "Hochhausfest," another video, is a mock documentary of a party given in a block of highrises. Chelsea Tonelli Wright's video, "Small Fantasies," has the artist coaching parents to act out scenes about their own deaths. All are of interest (and sometimes more), but none is a conventional narrative.

Similarly, the still pictures go off in different directions, indulging strong formalism (Stephan Fischer, Andreas Schulze), memorializing the everyday (Stephanie Kiwitt) or crossing fashion photography with contemporary portraiture (Elise Rasmussen). Only the restaging of family scenes by Jill Frank and an alteration of a press photograph of a crowd by Dominique Koch really engage us -- in Koch's case brilliantly -- with the semblance of stories. So this is a show to see for its surprises rather than fulfillment of a theme, with the German work having the most gravity.

At 78 E. Washington St. 312-744-6630.

EXHIBITIONS

Hollis Brown Thornton at Linda Warren Gallery through Aug. 16

"Clouds, et al" at Carrie Secrist Gallery through July 12

"Three Hours Between Planes: Contemporary Photography from Leipzig and Chicago" at the Chicago Cultural Center through Sunday